W. Kamau Bell
We Need to Talk About Cosby: W. Kamau Bell on Having “The Bigger Conversation,” and If He’d Do a Sequel
It’s probably possible to spend an entire decade discussing Bill Cosby, the comedy legend who was eventually revealed to be a serial predator. For We Need to Talk About Cosby, director W. Kamau Bell got four hours. “Showtime was great about giving us every minute they could, to let us push it as far as we could. Some of these episodes are like 59:59,” he tells Consequence in a Zoom interview. Bell, who also currently hosts CNN’s United Shades of America, brought his insight as a comedian who grew up as a “child of Bill Cosby,” as well as his experience working in documentary television, to the four-part series, which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival before its Showtime debut. The series tracks the entirety of Cosby’s career, putting into context the importance of the strides he...
We Need to Talk About Cosby Director Explains Why Hannibal Buress Doesn’t Appear in Doc
We Need to Talk About Cosby makes its mission statement clear from the jump, serving as a pretty comprehensive documentary covering the career of Bill Cosby alongside the many, many accusations of sexual assault that he allegedly committed over the decades. Directed by W. Kamau Bell, the four-part series, set to debut soon on Showtime, features a wide range of voices as interview subjects, including comedians, former Cosby colleagues, survivors of his assaults, and experts from a variety of fields. Not included as an interview subject is comedian Hannibal Buress, who has been acknowledged frequently as one of the reasons why the Cosby allegations, despite having been reported for years, finally broke into the public consciousness. Buress didn’t necessarily plan for that to happen, though —...
Sundance Review: We Need to Talk About Cosby Unravels the Man and the Monster
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: For fifty years, Bill Cosby was America’s Dad, a trailblazer for Black culture on film and television, and comedy. I Spy, The Electric Company, The Cosby Show: All pioneering examples of Black excellence and a guiding light to generations of Black people who yearned to see themselves depicted on screen with grace and intelligence. And then, we learned about the man under those comfy sweaters: someone with credible accusations of sexual assault and rape of dozens of women. For standup comedian W. Kamau Bell, and many Black people across America who’d grown up revering Cosby, those accusations were a tough pill to swallow. What do you do when a man whom you’d idolized, someone who carries seismic importan...
